Open Hardware: Arduino, Linux on Mobile, and RISC-V
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DIY SawStop saves fingers from shop mishaps | Arduino Blog
Many power tools have the potential to cause serious harm, but few are as dangerous as table saws. But table saws are also indispensable for woodworking, which means that people are willing to risk their fingers to use them. There is a manufacturer called SawStop that builds table saws that automatically stop the blade if they detect flesh. Unfortunately for hobbyists, SawStop table saws start at around $900 for even the most compact models. After receiving a free table saw from a friend, Ruth Amos decided to add DIY SawStop-style finger protection on a friendlier budget.
SawStop table saws have braking systems built to work with special blades. They use capacitive touch sensing, just like a touch-sensitive button, to detect when a finger (or any other body part) touches the blade. When that happens, it deploys the brakes and brings the blade to stop in just a few milliseconds. As SawStop advertisements love to demonstrate, the blade stops before it can do more than knick a finger. The emergency brakes destroy SawStop blades, but that’s a small price to pay to save a finger. Amos’s DIY safety precaution works in a similar manner, but without destroying the blade.
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Arduino-controlled robot solves Rubik’s Cubes in a couple seconds | Arduino Blog
Rubik’s Cubes have been sold in stores for more than 40 years now, but most of us still can’t solve them. Others take the puzzles very seriously, competing in many speed-solving competitions around the world. The world record for the fastest Rubik’s Cube solution is a mere 3.47 seconds, set by China’s Yusheng Du. But this robot created by Redditor iBoot32 puts that record to shame by solving the 3D puzzle in less than two seconds.
It may not seem like it, but the central square on each side of a Rubik’s Cube remains stationary. By spinning those squares, one can rotate the entire side of the cube. iBoot32’s robot design takes advantage of that fact and has six steppers motors that attach to the central squares on each of the Cube’s six sides. This arrangement gives the robot full manipulation of the Rubik’s cube.
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LINMOB.net - Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (30/2022): Ubuntu Touch on FairPhone 4, and, maybe, RISC-V phones in the future!
Also, more and more apps get ported to GTK4/libadwaita, Phosh 0.20 beta 3, KDE progress and more._
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Lilbits: Linux 5.19, Ryzen Embedded, and RISC-V - Liliputing
The MangoPi MQ Pro is an inexpensive single-board computer that looks a lot like a Raspberry Pi Zero, but which features a RISC-V processor rather than an ARM chip. So can you use it for all the same things you’d use a Raspberry Pi Zero for? Kind of.
RISC-V is a newer, less common CPU architecture and there’s not as much software optimized for it yet. But an independent developer has published a set of benchmarks that show the MangoPi MQ Pro does offer competitive performance, even if it costs a bit more and is a little harder to find in stock.
In other recent tech news from around the web, Gigabyte’s GIGAIPC subsidiary has unveiled a new 3.5 inch embedded PC board powered by an AMD Ryzen V2000 series embedded processor, Linus Torvalds used an Apple laptop with an ARM64 processor and Asahi Linux software to release Linux 5.19, and TuxPhones raises some good questions about the role of Pine64 in the open hardware space.